In this article on Slate.com, one of the letter writers asks Prudie about removing herself as a reference. Readers chime in and say that its company policy in some places that, for fear of a lawsuit, they don’t give references.
I’m not a typical “buyer beware” guy, I think there should be regulations to help the public for things that they are not able to be fully informed on through their own efforts, but I’m perfectly fine with letter a reference trash or praise the person who put them on their reference. I don’t get why that’s a sue-able offense.
If you get along with the person you’re putting as a reference, then they’re not going to purposefully trash you to a potential employer. Even if they accidentally say something bad, its just stuff that might happen. Its really the fault of the job seeker in putting that person as their reference in the first place. And if I run a company, I would certainly like to know if an applicant was a bad worker in his previous job.
What’s the question? Why it’s a bad idea from a legal perspective? It’s because people sometimes sue people for saying bad things about them. We call it slander, or at least we do when the bad things weren’t true. Defamation cases usually aren’t pursued, but where bad references are concerned damages are easier to establish: you didn’t get the job, therefore you have X months of lost wages.
Well no, that’s not the specific question. I can understand why its bad, but what I don’t agree with is that there are rules against it. To me, you take your chances that your reference will be a good one and talk you up when you put his name down. If you made a bad choice, that’s on you, not the guy you trusted and not the company you worked for
There should be, I think, a separation of responsibility between the person you are personally requesting as a reference, and the company’s responsibility as an employer of that person. Like, if you asked your neighbor Bob to be your reference and you don’t get the job, you shouldn’t be able to sue his employer because he works for them. Neither do I think if Bob’s your former supervisor at Acme Co., should you be able to hold Acme accountable if Bob trashes you in a reference. You trusted Bob, he burned you, its his fault, not Acme’s, so leave Acme out of it. Why don’t things work like that? Why is Acme held at least partially responsible for Bob trashing you?
Companies make those rules, there aren’t any laws. But I will tell you that whenever I’ve left a former co-worker or a manager as a PERSONAL reference, they’ve given detailed opinions about my work to prospective employers. One of those was actually unintentionally damaging(she mentioned that I don’t drive and some employers are prejudiced against non-drivers). But I’m not going to sue someone I used as a personal reference. Now if a business reference talks bad about me, all bets are off.
But where a person is an employee - co-worker but especially their ex-boss - the prospective employer doing the hiring and checking may not make the distinction between “friend who worked with the guy” giving his opinion, and “representative speaking on behalf of Acme Inc.” describing the guy’s work evaluation. Plus, not everyone who doesn’t get a job is magnanimous, particularly if there was a reason they left their previous employ or if they feel there is malicious intent buried in the reference. Plus, when a person files a lawsuit, if they can in any way drag in the big pockets (the company, not some poor working schmuck) they will add that entity to the lawsuit and let the judge sort it out or hope the company makes an offer if there is a tiny sliver of merit in the case. By the time a company defends itself from a lawsuit, it probably would be cheaper to settle. hence the rule I’ve run across quite often - “all we will confirm is that the person worked here, his job title, and duration of employment.” Say nothing but facts, give no opinions.
Also want to point out there have been lawsuits where the company hired someone based on a glowing reference, only to find the person totally useless - then sued the previous employer for giving a glowing reference for a complete useless pile of barn droppings.
Every company whose policy on this matter that I know of will only verify the start date, end date, and end title of a former employee. I’ve always been led to believe that this policy was for legal (EG, fear of lawsuit) reasons.
(If it’s your policy to only give out this information, you never give out any information beyond those items, then nobody can sue you for giving out misleading information as long as what you gave out was correct.)
That’s pretty naive. In this litigation culture, it’s always the other guy’s fault. It’s always on them until proven otherwise in a court of law (and all appeals), or the court of public opinion (if it plays well in the media).
So yeah. There are folks who will take a negative reference as an act of slander and attempt to litigate it accordingly. As an employer and a business, why take the chance?
Sometimes it goes backwards too. I could give someone a great review even though it should be terrible and then I could have the new employer calling me asking why I did that too them. Especially if we’re all in the same industry.
Sometimes this comes up when we’re trying to unload an awful (even litigious) employee that’s finally decided to leave on their own. Do you give them a good reference to get them out sooner or are you honest and hope there’s no backlash and/or end up with them sticking around longer because they can’t find a job?
When I get a call about a former employee, the question I like to here is ‘is this person eligible for rehire?’. If they don’t ask, sometimes I’ll feed it to them. "We don’t give references, I can verify employment but that’s about it, oh, um, she’s not eligible for rehire…if that helps’. But we usually only do something like that if the new employer is someone we know and the applicant was a particularly awful employee.
I had a boss who called a former employer just to confirm that I had worked there - and the store manager, with whom I did not work directly, gave him a total earful about the OTHER pharmacist who worked there - “pompous ass”, that kind of thing. For some reason, they couldn’t seem to get enough on him to fire him, let alone revoke his license (see footnote) so they were kind of stuck with him.
Last time I checked, he still works there - 19 YEARS LATER. :eek:
Footnote: He was (massive understatement) not nice to the Medicaid patients :mad: and criticized me for doing otherwise. Other employees told me that they had seen him taking bottles of liquid medicine into the bathroom when I wasn’t there :eek:; we all knew he was probably spitting or urinating into them, or maybe worse.
Don’t forget California. And a lot of other places. They’re not defending car crash cases, but they are defending corporations in high stakes litigation . $600/hr or more is not uncommon. You’re right, of course, you could pay a lot less to have a good attorney raise the immunity issue. But, as everyone has been saying, it’s a lot cheaper and safer to just have a policy that doesn’t say much about former employee.
The issue this creates is that for skilled labor, a reasonable measurement of skill is what sort of technical systems you have designed and built, or what kind or projects you have led (for engineers and managers, respectively)
In this culture of “start and end date, that’s it”, it’s
a. Unfair to honest people. Liars can claim expertise in systems they barely touched, that they led much larger teams than they did, etc.
b. It leads to inflation. Everyone is claiming they did more than they actually did, knowing that they can never be caught for their exaggeration.
It creates a scenario where the only references people trust are the ones that are too hard to fake. This, ironically, is why those Ivy league and even state school degrees are worth so much - you can realistically learn the same things on the job, eventually, if you had the right experiences, but since everyone lies about those experiences but transcripts are much harder to fake…
And all the policies about not giving references (beyond dates, job title, and “eligible for rehire”) are all reduced to a sham anyway, because “eligible for rehire?” is the big loophole.
All the former employer has to say is “Eligible or rehire” or “Not eligible for rehire”. That’s all the prospective employer needs to hear. That tells him everything he thinks he needs to know.
Fuck the entire employment process. It’s all phony theater, and the goodies flow to he who can best stage-manage his application and interview process. I’m sure glad I’m a bit beyond all that now, at my stage of life.
But what if they do purposefully trash you? You can’t just assert it won’t happen, and claim that the problem doesn’t exist. Obviously, most people will give an honest reference. And if you picked the person to give the reference, then it’ll probably also be a good one. But there are certainly cases where they make up vicious lies to purposefully harm your reputation. It’s not likely, but it happens. And offering them as a reference shouldn’t absolve them of blame for that malicious act.
Here’s a (maybe bad) analogy. If you hire someone to house sit, then come home and find yourself robbed, is it just your fault that you picked the wrong person to house sit? I would argue that you gave them your house keys for the purposes of doing an honest job, and if they do something harmful and illegal, there should be legal consequences. Just like you gave the person’s name for the purposes of an honest evaluation of your work, and if they do something harmful and illegal, legal consequences.
Well, sure. But we have to balance that against people wanting to be protected from harmful slander.
This is the problem - not only do you risk a lawsuit from the ex-employee if your reference stops them from getting a job… but a glowing and misleading reference could result in the guy getting the job, and then the other company suing you for misleading them based on the cost of getting a dud employee.
Another feature of Canadian law is that unlike US law, most of the time the loser pays the winner’s legal bills, resulting in many fewer frivolous lawsuits. But yes, a corporate attorney can cost so much simply to deal with a frivolous suit, that it is cheaper to settle, and still more cheaper to not do anything that could generate a lawsuit.
As for “not eligible for rehire” that can mean anything. In my experience, that is a decision the immediate boss gets to make, and it may be something as trivial as attendance issues (in one case I’m aware of, the boss was intolerant of the person’s health issues at the time, so when she quit he decided to put “no rehire”. Five years later, she applies and is denied hire at a different branch due to a sickness she had a month before she quit five years ago.)
I doubt any manager is going to give technical details like that (which are usually proprietary) in a reference letter if they are allowed to give one. BTW, the reasons md2000 gave match what I’ve been told exactly.
Knowing that a person managed n people doesn’t mean that they managed n people effectively. I have not trouble figuring out how much people really know in interviews by probing them on the depths of their understanding of the field. If someone claimed they worked on something they can’t explain clearly, it comes out.
Grad school transcripts, especially for PhDs, are pretty useless since everyone gets As. We get low GPAs screened out for us. Since my field is small, I usually know the professor of a candidate, and I do ask him or her where this candidates stands in relationship to other students they have had.
Anyhow, I never even see references for experienced candidates, and never have felt the need to. Also, knowing that you’ll need a reference from someone outside your company might encourage people to network and get active outside their companies, which is easy to do in tech fields. That is good.